Abstract

Abstract. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite launched in summer of 2014. Its observations could allow scientists to constrain CO 2 fluxes across regions or continents that were previously difficult to monitor. This study explores an initial step toward that goal; we evaluate the extent to which current OCO-2 observations can detect patterns in biospheric CO 2 fluxes and constrain monthly CO 2 budgets. Our goal is to guide top-down, inverse modeling studies and identify areas for future improvement. We find that uncertainties and biases in the individual OCO-2 observations are comparable to the atmospheric signal from biospheric fluxes, particularly during Northern Hemisphere winter when biospheric fluxes are small. A series of top-down experiments indicate how these errors affect our ability to constrain monthly biospheric CO 2 budgets. We are able to constrain budgets for between two and four global regions using OCO-2 observations, depending on the month, and we can constrain CO 2 budgets at the regional level (i.e., smaller than seven global biomes) in only a handful of cases (16 % of all regions and months). The potential of the OCO-2 observations, however, is greater than these results might imply. A set of synthetic data experiments suggests that retrieval errors have a salient effect. Advances in retrieval algorithms and to a lesser extent atmospheric transport modeling will improve the results. In the interim, top-down studies that use current satellite observations are best-equipped to constrain the biospheric carbon balance across only continental or hemispheric regions.